


A New Covenant

by lightgetsin



Series: The Spirit and the Letter [2]
Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Handcuffs, Injury, M/M, Magic, Recovery, Sexswap, Trust Issues, book: Changes, year in the life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-08
Updated: 2011-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-14 14:21:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was like playing chicken with intimacy, both of us pushing and pushing and waiting to see who blinked first.</p><p>(A year in the life. Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/109799">The Spirit and the Letter</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Covenant

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to treewishes, misspamela, readerjane, and cmshaw for beta.

  
**December 24**   


The charcuterie plate at Sixteen in the Trump Tower was unappetizing, the company was irritating, and John would have traded the champagne for a cold beer in a heartbeat. He was not in a good mood; the piped in Christmas carols weren’t helping.

It was unseasonably cold. John made a mental note to quiz Gard on whether there was any connection between the ascendancy of a faerie court and unusual weather. Ms. Stone must be freezing, sitting close to the window and wearing so little like that.

“—all the lights, it’s just _gorge_ , don’t you think?” she was saying.

“Absolutely,” John said. “I couldn’t agree more. But it’s getting late. If Bruce has been held up, maybe we should reschedule.”

“Or we could just order,” she said. “The oysters here are _fab_ , have you—“

John stopped listening, because all the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and a second later Hendricks leaned over from the table behind him to urgently hiss, “Boss.”

He looked around and his gut lurched with a double shock of alarm and relief. Because there was Harry Dresden, back alive from the faerie winter solstice revels, glaring daggers at him. And apparently a woman again.

“Excuse me,” John said, and left Ms. Stone in mid-spate. Harry was wearing dark jeans and a fitted black T-shirt; he stood tall in the entrance, letting the glances of better-dressed patrons slide right off him. He wasn’t obviously hurt, but there was a hectic flush to his skin. And it was odd for him to go out dressed like that, to forget that normal people would freeze without a coat.

“Mister Dresden,” John said. He caught the maître d’s double-take out of the corner of his eye. “You’re all right?”

“I’m peachy,” Harry said. “Guess you’ve been busy while I was gone.”

“Just the usual,” John said, and then belatedly figured out what was going on here. Dresden made him stupidly slow sometimes: this was why John so rarely let himself indulge in desperate lust. He turned – Hendricks was right behind him. “Tell Ms. Stone that I’ve had a more important engagement come up, and that when her boyfriend wants to reschedule, he should call my assistant. Oh, and only pay half the bill.” He turned back to Harry. “Daring rescues a specialty,” he said, smiling. “Thank you, your timing is perfect.”

“Who is that, anyway?” Harry really needed to work on faking casual disinterest.

John didn’t turn to watch Hendricks deliver his message. “I was supposed to be having dinner with a business associate to iron out some details on a property sale,” he said. “Instead, his mistress shows up and he’s nowhere to be found. I assume she was supposed to seduce me.” He rested his hand on the small of Harry’s back, gently turning him. “I have a suite, do you want to come upstairs?” He paused. “Or are you hungry?”

“Can’t we just order room service?” Harry let himself be led, strangely biddable. “Later?”

John swallowed. Well well well. “Of course.”

One day, he was going to be unavailable when Harry dropped out of the blue like this to monopolize his time and attention. John was honest enough with himself to admit that whatever satisfaction he would gain from turning him away that day, however it would soothe the persistent itch of letting Dresden call so many shots, it wouldn’t be worth it.

He let himself stare in the mirrored elevator wall on the way up. Harry looked exactly the same as he had last time he’d been a woman, just three months ago. He was arresting. Even though he was shorter this way, he still had that quality of storklike improbability. He was a little less bony; he looked like a model on vacation – so tall and lean, with one of those faces full of interesting angles that looked odd to the naked eye but were probably just the right light away from extraordinary.

It was disorienting, looking at him. A woman, yes, but when he was speaking or moving or making eye contact, it was indisputably clear that he was . . . him. But if John caught a look at her out of the corner of his eye, or if he got distracted by the swell of her breasts or the curve of her waist, she was a woman. A woman that he wanted. But then again he’d always known Harry Dresden was something odd and extraordinary.

“Right here,” he said, fishing for his room key. Harry stepped back while he operated the electronic lock, then followed him in, weirdly quiet. He glanced around the sitting room, tension drawing his shoulders into a tight line.

“Sit down,’ John said. “Drink?”

“Stars, yes,” Harry said, dropping onto the end of the sofa.

John considered the bar, then dug into the fridge underneath for two cold beers. He brought a bottle opener with him, but Harry popped the cap with one of his silver rings. He refused solicitous gestures with such instinctive independence, he probably never knew it happened at all.

“Are we toasting?” John asked.

Harry clinked the necks of their bottles together. “To hell with it,” he said obscurely, his mouth twisted.

John lifted an eyebrow, but repeated it. “And to coming home safe.”

Harry took a long swallow. “What, were you worried?”

About his lover taking part in power rituals in the court of an ancient psychopath? “Occasionally,” he said. “So, are you going to tell me what you did to get in the doghouse this time?”

“Oh, you know, the usual,” Harry said vaguely. Knowing him, that could encompass anything from mooning the Winter Queen to destroying an entire race of vampires on a few days notice. “It won’t last as long this time, though. We only have until sunrise.”

Now that was a fascinating way of phrasing it. Especially considering that no matter how disorienting this was for John, it was a hundred times worse for Harry.

“Look,” Harry said, setting his bottle down half full. “Can we just – can we not do the small talk thing tonight?” His hands were flexing unhappily, his feet tapping. If he were strung any tighter, he’d start coming apart at the joints.

“To be clear,” John said impulsively, “that really wasn’t a date you walked in on.”

“I honestly don’t care,” Harry said, which was such an infuriating, bold-faced fucking lie that John nearly laughed.

“Really?” he said. “That’s how you’re going to play this?”

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about, so yeah, I guess so,” Harry said belligerently.

For years, John had caught himself fantasizing about fucking him whenever they fought. Now that he’d actually gotten to do that, he occasionally reverted to more traditional fantasies of just _strangling_ him.

Harry was going to sit there and try to convince them both that he didn’t care who else John was sleeping with. He must imagine it was a parade of alternating prostitutes and socialites. Just thinking about it was exhausting, but Harry probably wouldn’t believe a word if John tried to tell him how rarely he felt attraction strong enough to be worth acting on.

Harry Dresden did monogamy; he might as well have it stenciled on his forehead, it was so obvious. John had never tried it before; no one had ever been in a position to demand or receive commitments from him far less serious than that. It had never seemed to occur to Harry that he might have more relevant experience in some things. And John was perfectly willing to try it, if asked – he was perfectly willing to enter all kinds of new territory here.

But Harry wasn’t going to ask, because that would mean he might have to talk about the other people . . . things _he_ was sleeping with, and he was blanking that so thoroughly that it was honestly terrifying. He didn’t brag about it, he didn’t complain about it, he didn’t joke about how John measured up to a faerie queen, he didn’t talk about it at all. And if John wasn’t mistaken, he was managing to not even think about it.

John exhaled carefully. You knew you were getting older and wiser when you could actually recognize that you were angry at the wrong person.

Harry met his eyes, shaking his head ruefully. “Time out,” he said, and made a visible effort to straighten his wary hunch. “This isn’t going well. Do over?”

“Thank you, yes,” John said, relieved. At least things hadn’t gotten so out of hand that they couldn’t still salvage the evening, this time.

“You’re a lot of fucking work, you know that?” Harry complained.

“And you aren’t?”

Harry smirked. “That’s why you like me, don’t lie.” That was unarguably true. “Hang on,” Harry said. He got up and crossed the room to stand at the window for a minute, his back turned. John purposefully didn’t stare; he took the time to switch off his iPhone and remove his digital watch.

Harry came back across the room, boots quiet on the carpet. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi.” John held out his hands. Harry took them and, surprisingly, slid sideways into his lap. John pulled him closer and bent to kiss his neck, his jaw, his mouth. “I missed you,” he said. And worried himself into a state of manic efficiency until he’d alienated everyone around him.

Harry blinked; he was always so startled by John’s sincerity. But he nearly always recognized it, so there was that. “I don’t really want to talk,” he said. “Can we just go to bed? Is that okay?”

John ran a hand up Harry’s thigh and fitted his thumb into the hollow of his hipbone. “Oh no,” he said dryly, “how terrible, anything but that.”

“Asshole,” Harry said affectionately, sliding to his feet. John put his hands on Harry’s waist and guided him into the bedroom from behind. He took a guess and left the lights off. There was still plenty of ambient glow from the Loop out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The last time Harry had been a woman, he’d been all bossy bravado layered over panic. He was calmer this time, and of course they weren’t quite so new to each other now.

John cataloged as they took their clothes off. There was a set of long, fine cuts on Harry’s left bicep, a day or two old. His right ankle was badly scraped. There was a strange constellation of bruises on his right side that wouldn’t resolve into any sensible shape until John realized that the hand which had gripped him there had extra fingers.

They held each other for a while, standing naked at the foot of the bed and kissing until John’s mouth felt swollen. It was nice to be the same height again. They worked each other up bit by bit, just enjoying the ride. Harry was uncharacteristically quiet, just turning into his touches and sighing softly when John slid his palm from waist to breast.

They drifted toward the bed, and there was a brief, silent fight over who would be on top. John won, and Harry came down hard over him, legs sprawling to either side of his hips and letting out a quiet, unmistakably feminine squeak. She was already wet, and she moved deliberately against him, fitting his dick between her thighs. He pushed up, rubbing the length on her slit, teasing both of them until she was moving with him, clutching at his shoulders for leverage.

“Come here,” he said, and pulled her up until she was propped on her hands over him and he could get his mouth on her breasts. He rubbed his cheek against her until she shivered from the faint stubble prickle, and then caught each nipple in his mouth. Harry was more sensitive as a man; John could be rougher now, biting down and twisting until she swore at him, her arms visibly trembling.

“Oh yeah?” she said, breathless and narrow-eyed. She slithered down him, on a mission.

“Condom,” he said hastily, because Harry never seemed to remember. Harry made a face like John practiced safe sex specifically to be annoying, but let him dig a packet out of the nightstand and even applied it for him.

John held her off long enough to twist around and get them both on their sides, head-to-toe. She went down on him like it really was a competition, and he grinned to himself, his blood pounding, and spread her open with both hands.

This was a good angle – he could get his tongue deep into her. And when he backed off to suck at her clit, her frantic noises tickled the head of his dick. They kept at each other, competitively, until John had to gasp a quick breath.

He pushed a finger into her alongside his tongue. She quaked around him, then grabbed his wrist and guided him further back. John laughed against her, delighted. _There_ was the bossiness.

He worked one finger into her ass with just her own slick. She got distracted fast; his dick slipped out of her mouth and she was letting quiet vowel sounds escape between her teeth. Harry was noisy sometimes, and then other times he was silent, like a challenge, making John work for every concession.

“Okay,” Harry said after a while. “More.”

“Not without—“ John began, wondering in some dismay just how well the staff kept the permanent suites stocked. She wriggled away, and he lifted his head to watch her long reach over the side of the bed to her jeans. He was so distracted, he nearly didn’t catch the little bottle she threw at him. “Did you . . . make this?” he asked, staring at the handwritten label, helplessly charmed.

“I even got my raw ingredients locally,” she said. “But I spent possibly the worst twenty minutes of my life having to talk to my lab assistant about it, so you better appreciate it.”

The mysterious invisible lab assistant again, who was apparently trusted enough to have candid sex conversations. Huh. John was sleeping with Harry, and _he_ didn’t get to have candid sex conversations. “I appreciate it,” he said. He slicked up two fingers and eased them into her, a centimeter at a time.

He rested his cheek on her thigh, watching what he was doing. He could feel the muscles of her legs flexing against each other, like she was _almost_ fighting it. But she was moaning now, like she couldn’t help it, and pushing onto his fingers.

“Another,” she said, hoarse.

So, there was an agenda here. Adrenaline slammed John’s brain, kicking him up to a more intense level of sensory awareness. He fingered her slowly with three for a long time, using so much slick it was practically frictionless. She was breathing hard, two fingers rolling her clit.

He went for four. She said “fuck!” in a high, shocked voice and grabbed his thigh, digging her short nails in.

He kept at her until all four fingers were sliding smoothly and the shaking tension had eased in her legs and hips.

“Okay,” she said at last, “I’m good.”

He was running so hot by then, he couldn’t really let himself think about it. He got her onto her hands-and-knees. She went easily, but then her shoulders hunched and her head ducked. John knew better than to say anything. He leaned far over so he could put his arms around her. She slowly unknotted under him, and when she exhaled, he pushed in.

She dropped, like her arms couldn’t hold her up, and grabbed handfuls of the duvet to clench. “Motherfucker, motherfucker,” she repeated, muffled. He eased in as carefully as he could, and felt her whole body flex, and shake, and give. She pushed up on her hands, back arching; her knees slid further apart, letting him just a bit deeper.

He screwed her as slowly as he could, pressed to her back as the sweat slicked between them and she said quiet, nonsense syllables. It was so good, he almost couldn’t believe it. He could enjoy women under particular circumstances, and Harry Dresden was a particular circumstance in every respect. But when it came right down to it, John had always preferred men.

Yet now, with the smell of her in his nose, and the weight of her breast in his hand, and the wet sounds as she fingered herself, it was still getting to him like only fucking a man ever had before.

“Are you,” he panted, “going to ever let me do this again. When you change back?”

“Maybe,” she said, flushed red behind the strands of sweaty hair stuck to her face. “If you make it worth my while.” Which was contrary wizard speak for _fuck yes_. “Don’t stop.”

“I got you, I won’t stop,” John said. He bent lower over her back, wrapped her up tight, and brought them both up so he was sitting on his heels and she was spread across his lap. Her hips rolled, asking for it before he was even settled.

He had less leverage this way, but that was probably for the best. And now he could look down over her shoulder, watch her breasts move and her fingers working hard between her legs. He kissed the side of her neck, rocking steadily into her.

She turned her head to look at him; at some point, she’d bitten her lip hard enough to bleed. He licked her gently there, to hell with safe sex anyway. Wizard blood was supposed to be potent; he imagined that he could taste the power. She kissed him and closed her eyes. “Put your fingers in me,” she breathed.

Her legs were spread wide enough across his thighs that it was easy to get his hand past her rubbing fingers, bend his wrist, and push easy into her empty cunt. She was so wet her thighs were slick with it.

“Breathe in,” he said.

She did, and he bounced her once with a controlled jolt of his thighs. The breath came out on a scream.

“Again,” she demanded. He did, and “again,” and “again.” And when he bounced her on his dick and his fingers that time, she locked up so tight she went silent, not even breathing. He held her up, the only sound his rushing breath, wishing he could see her face better. She loosened in stages after, shaking and, inexplicably, laughing.

She was still wringing weakly at his fingers. He pulled them out and lifted her by the thighs, easing her off him. His biceps burned and his hands shook.

“What?” she said, sounding completely out of it.

He tipped her forward, back onto her knees. She kept going, though, so when he fucked into her cunt on a fast push, he just rode her down flat to the bed. He was rough suddenly, needfully, fucking her in short, shallow strokes. She came to life and flailed back at him. Her nails scored his hip as she clumsily yanked him closer. He came, completely out-of-control, so hard that it threw one thigh into stinging cramps.

They curled up together after for a long time, cooling stickily. John smoothed her hair and stroked her back. He could see Chicago glowing down there, out the window, and Harry was here and safe. Happiness crept up on him, stealthy and unaccustomed.

He started feeling the chill, eventually. The heater seemed not to be working. Harry had probably fried it. John smiled to himself, ridiculously smug like a swaggering teenager.

He unfolded the throw blanket from the foot of the bed to crawl under. Harry came with him and curled up under his arm, unself-consciously cuddly in the afterglow.

“Do you still want food?” John asked, playing his fingers down Harry’s ribs.

“Mmm, food,” Harry said dreamily. “Yeah. One of everything. When my legs are working again.” He stretched and yawned.

“God damn,” John said meditatively. He extended his legs and pointed his toes, feeling the pull in tired muscles.

“Oh, by the way.” Harry rolled over and propped his chin on John’s bicep. He was smirking. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” John said, pleasantly surprised. “How did you know?”

“It’s public record,” he said. “Assuming that’s your actual birthday.”

“It is,” John said.

“Unlike your name, which clearly isn’t,” Harry clarified.

John blinked. “Where did you get that idea.”

Harry waved at himself. “Wizard, remember? Names matter. You’ve used yours long enough so that it really does belong to you, but it still doesn’t . . . have the same density. It’s hard to explain.” He yawned, unconcerned by the whole conversation. “Also, I’m not stupid.”

“It’s not important,” John said. “My old name.”

Harry gave him a look like _why are we still talking about this_? “I know. You are who you are now. Anyway. Happy birthday. I didn’t have time to get you anything, so I figured I’d just get you me.”

That, and for some puritanically repressed reason, he’d needed to come this way to ask for something he wanted. Or to let himself enjoy it, maybe. Wizards were generally an old-fashioned lot, but were they all so screwed up about sex?

Jesus Christ, Harry had just all but admitted that he’d baited a Goddamn faerie into casting unspeakably powerful spells on him so he could get laid without busting through all his weird boundaries at once. That was insane. Hot. But insane.

“Nothing better,” John said softly. “Do you need to be anywhere in particular at sunrise?”

“Naw, it should just wear off this time,” Harry said.

“Then stay. Have Christmas breakfast with me.”

“Oh, hey, Christmas,” Harry said, startled. “Right, I forgot about that.”

“You’ve been busy,” John said. And out-of-touch in the nevernever, where time could apparently flow differently.

Harry made a face. “It won’t be pretty,” he said. “Tomorrow morning.”

“All right,” John said. “So it won’t be pretty. Stay.”

Harry gave him a cool, narrow-eyed look, and if John had ever been a gambling man, he would have bet it all that Harry was about to walk. But then Harry put his head back down, his hair tickling the inside of John’s elbow. “Okay,” he said. “Where’s the room service menu?”

*

  


  
**March 15**   


I wasn’t too surprised when I figured out where the tracking spell was leading me: I’d been expecting a bar, but a church worked, too.

St. Mary’s is never closed, and definitely never empty. At dusk on a random rainy Thursday, there were a good dozen people in the church proper, with a priest up front doing priest things.

John was in the last pew. I slid in next to him as quietly as I could, and bent my head when everyone else did. John hadn’t, I realized when I looked up again. He was just watching, grimly focused. I was surprised the poor priest could still manage to read with John boring holes in him like that.

Hell’s bells, was he pulling his creepster stalker routine on _God_?

I’m hardly devout, but I’ve hung out with enough Catholics to know the standard patter. “Hang on,” I whispered to John, leaning in. “This isn’t Mass.”

“It’s part of the Liturgy of the Hours,” he whispered back. “ . . Heathen.”

“Wizard,” I corrected automatically. I rested my shoulder against his. We sat like that for a while, listening.

Being a wizard instills a healthy respect for ritual as a tool, a way to herd the magical and the conscious selves like cats. I found this one mildly soothing, if largely nonfunctional. I didn’t know what John was getting out of it, but he was still and tense against my shoulder.

The priest said the last “amen,” and people started drifting out.

“Hendricks called you,” John said, not moving.

“Yep.” The conversation had taken an entire ten seconds, during which I hadn’t been allowed to say a single thing. Hendricks had sounded like he’d rather have been turning over evidence to a district attorney. “I think it killed a bit of his soul.” The corner of John’s mouth twitched. “Hey,” I said, and jostled our shoulders together. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a stroke,” he said calmly. “Her doctor thinks she’s probably been having micro-embolisms for a long time. It’s not unexpected.”

I’d spent a fair amount of time since becoming the Winter Knight explaining to myself why I shouldn’t be upset about various things, so I knew what it sounded like. “Still,” I said. “Sucks.”

He cut me an incredulous look, but I’d managed to make him smile again, a little bit. “Profound, as always.”

“Uh-huh.” We watched the priest quietly speaking with an elderly couple. The church had mostly emptied out, and the sunset glow was gone from the stained-glass windows.

I’m no psychologist, but I thought the technical term for John’s current state was _fucked in the head_. Amanda Beckitt had been his guilt object, his holy artifact. He was a control freak with a tightly-leashed but violent temper. He ran Chicago crime so well he could write a fucking management textbook, and he’d never lost a minute of sleep over any of it, not the drugs, not the gambling, not the prostitutes, not the killing. “It needs doing,” he said every time we fought about it. “And I’m the best at doing it.” And if he really wanted to piss me off, he’d add that he liked it, too.

I _hated_ that about him. Except that was a lie, I didn’t, because it’s just who he was, and I . . . didn’t hate him.

Let’s not talk about the sleep _I_ lost.

So no guilt for his crimes, legal and moral. But for mistakes? For bullets gone astray? For someone getting hurt out of his obsessive control – for a _kid_? For that, he’d pay and pay and pay.

Completely fucked in the head.

I should get him out of there. We could crack a bottle, or he could go hit a punching bag for a while, or we could have some life-affirming sex. Just _something_.

“Hey,” I said, touching his knee, “why don’t we—“ I glanced up. John inhaled, and I realized after a few seconds that I’d clamped down hard on him, my fingers digging deep into the muscle of his thigh.

“Problem?” he said, and I was positive he’d just half-drawn a concealed weapon.

I carefully unclenched my hand. “Not . . . exactly,” I said. The guy was halfway up the aisle on John’s side of the pew. He was wearing jeans and a ratty hoody; he had one foot propped flat on the wall he was leaning against. He was watching us, and as soon as he saw me looking, he straightened up and wandered casually over. “Um!” I said articulately, trying to figure out what I could say to John in the next five seconds that might actually be useful.

“Evening, gents,” Jake the janitor said, slipping into the pew on John’s other side.

I leaned around John, keeping him in place with a grip on his knee. “I thought you’d moved on to a new model,” I said.

Jake waved a hand. “Flesh,” he said dismissively.

My pulse was thumping hard in my wrists. I’d only ever seen him at my lowest, injured or exhausted or drunk or all of the above, and every time in the aftermath of something bad. If he was bothering to show up before the bad thing happened, I was frankly scared out of my mind.

So obviously I got kind of mouthy. “You know I’m signed with another team, right?”

He lifted an eyebrow, amused. “Are you?”

“Yep. And a mid-season trade would really cost ya.”

“That’s not really how it works, you know,” he said mildly. “But I’m not here to see you.”

. . . Oh. He was here after the bad thing happened. It just wasn’t my bad thing.

“I’d like a minute with your young man, please,” he said.

My _what_ , now? John looked faintly incredulous, his eyes flicking between us. And he hadn’t taken his hand out of his jacket, either.

“. . . Okay,” I said. I was weirdly reluctant to leave them alone. Not that I could help in the slightest if this was going to go bad. I got up before I could say anything mortifyingly stupid like, _he’s having a bad day, okay?_ or _he might not be a good guy, but he’s a pretty good guy_.

I retreated back towards the doors, out of earshot but not out of sight. They talked for less than four minutes, angled towards each other on the pew. John gestured once, emphatically, but neither of them raised their voices above a serious murmur.

At last Jake slapped John on the shoulder, friendly, and strolled away up the aisle. John watched him go, then slid out of the pew like a greased cat. He came at me fast, seized my wrist, and practically dragged me outside.

“Whoa,” I said, jogging down the steps with him. “You okay? Um, John, car. John? John!”

He stopped on the sidewalk, took a deep breath, and turned smartly on his heel to march towards the black car at the curb. Hendricks and I nodded at each other as we got in, but John merely slapped the privacy screen control.

“Who,” he said, clipped, “the hell was _that_?”

“Uh, wrong affiliation,” I said.

“Harry. That – he _knew things_.”

Take note, ladies and gentlemen. This is what John Marcone looks like when he’s freaked right the fuck out.

“Yeah,” I said carefully. “It’s okay. Congratulations: you just met an archangel.”

John froze up for a second, then he sat back and finally let go of my wrist.

“I’d rather not say his name, if you don’t mind,” I said.

John nodded brusquely. He lifted one palm to me, and I shut up for a slow ten count while he thought. Finally he dropped his hand and his shoulders in the same motion.

“Okay?” I asked. He’d fought fallen angels without batting an eyelash, but one of the white hats comes by to have a chat with him, and he loses it. Catholics.

“Harry.” His voice was shaking. It freaked me out until I realized that he was laughing, and then I was a little more freaked out. “C’mere,” he said, and snagged my wrist again.

I slid across, willing to play along. He was still laughing when he kissed me. He was aggressive; one hand was a little rough in my hair, the other kneaded high up on my thigh. I was still tripping off adrenaline, too, so I caught his mood and gave it right back to him.

I was breathless when he let me go. “Seriously,” I said, resting our foreheads together. “Okay?”

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Harry,” he said affectionately. “You just told _an archangel of the Lord_ that he couldn’t afford you.” Okay, so he wasn’t going to tell me what they’d talked about. Fair enough.

I sniffed haughtily. “I don’t come cheap.”

John kissed me again. “Don’t I know it,” he said softly. “Come home with me. Have dinner.”

I was getting better at mentally turning all his high-handed orders into polite questions. And he wasn’t having a good day, anyway.

“Okay,” I said. “I can do that.”

He took me out of the city to his mansion, like he did more and more often. It turned out my prescription for what he needed was pretty accurate. We opened a bottle of scotch older than me over dinner, and drank to Amanda Beckitt, may she rest in peace at last.

And then we fucked in his palatial master suite, with the renewed rain hammering against the glass balcony doors.

I couldn’t write out a list of his tells, but I was starting to know them anyway, somehow. So it wasn’t really a surprise when he got me on my back and pulled my arms over my head, circling my wrists with hard hands.

“Let me?” he said, and I figured hey, I really should reward him for actually asking.

“Sure,” I said.

The handcuffs were the classy kind – black leather lined with silk and closed with silver buckles. I tilted my head back to watch as John unclasped my shield bracelet, moving quickly, and replaced it with the cuff. He fed the connecting chain around the leg of the nightstand and squeezed my other wrist. He was already breathing fast, his eyes dilating.

I was a bit drunker than I’d thought, because I finally said what I’d been thinking since he’d first asked me to do this. “You know I can get out of these, right?”

He buckled the second cuff. “I know.”

I frowned. John was a kinky bastard, and a lot of it didn’t really make sense to me on the gut and groin level. But this just didn’t make sense, period. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?” I asked.

“Not at all.” He ran his fingers lightly down the insides of my arms. “You can get out of these with one spell, you wouldn’t even have to try much, would you?” I shook my head and he flashed me his teeth. “But you _don’t_ ,” he said. He slid down and kissed me for a long time while his hands wandered, obscene and thorough.

What he said simmered while he went down on me, viciously slow. And somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, things shifted around in my brain. I hadn’t minded the cuffs the previous two times he’d asked me to wear them, but they hadn’t done anything special for me. But that night, I can’t explain it. I’d always known how hot they made him, but now it was something _I_ was doing. And doing that for him got me going but good.

The whole thing went really intense before either of us knew what was happening. I tried to hold him down with my thighs when he stopped sucking me, but he grinned like a shark and pinned me down, the muscles in his shoulders flexing. So I fought the cuffs, no magic, just brawn. He _loved_ that, and the hotter he got, the hotter I got, until the chain was grinding into the wood of the nightstand and my biceps were shaking and we were snarling at each other to “fuck me harder, god damn you,” and “show me that you like it, that’s it, just like that.”

Yowza.

He left me cuffed while he got rid of the condom and cleaned me up. Then he lingered over my wrists for a long time, rubbing them even though they hadn’t chafed or probably even bruised, the cuffs were so well made.

I was feeling lazy and contented; I held my hand out and let him clasp my shield bracelet for me.

“Harry Dresden, who talks to angels,” he said softly.

I glanced away. “Don’t you mean ‘talks back to angels?’”

He laughed warmly. “That too, definitely,” he said, and settled down next to me.

He went to sleep in under three minutes, no problem. Which he almost always managed, but everything considered, I felt pretty good about taking credit for it today.

I dropped off, woke, and dozed again, then woke up sometime after midnight. The rain was petering out, and John slept soundly in watery moonlight.

My wizard foresight, when it pops up, is usually a lot more obscure. But this time I just . . . knew. There was logic to it, too – archangels don’t go around talking to just anybody. John had caught someone’s attention. Big attention. The kind that had been lingering on me, heavy, for years. And the foresight surety said no, wait, it’s not that he’s important, it’s that he could be. Maybe. He has a choice to make.

I was not nearly as surprised as I should have been.

*

  


  
**June 21**   


There was a skull on his pillow.

John stopped, tie half-unknotted between his fingers. That was human. And it looked so old and worn, it was probably real.

Harry’s staff was leaning against the wall by the door, and the shower was running, so it likely wasn’t some obscure threat from an overdramatic enemy. Well, there was that.

John unthreaded his tie from his collar and dropped it into the dry-cleaning basket. Then he went over for a closer look.

The skull smelled old. It was very clean, though, and bleached so white it was nearly translucent in places. There were faint carvings across the brow, definitely not anything like Gard’s runes. John was not about to go poking possibly magical artifacts, but he did lean in close to see better.

The eye sockets flared up with a malevolent orange glow. John froze, staring point-blank into hellish light from just three inches away.

“Well hell- _lo_ nurse,” the skull said, rattling its jaw. “You must be the sugar daddy!”

The shower shut off. “Harry,” John called, not moving. “Is there supposed to be a talking skull here?”

The shower door rattled, and he distinctly heard Harry say, “oh _crap_. Um!” Harry said louder. “Yes? You’re early. Just, uh, don’t let him talk you into anything I wouldn’t like. Or . . . anything at all. I’ll be out in a sec.”

Him, not it. Okay then. John leaned back and sat on the edge of the bed. “I prefer John Marcone,” he said. “And you are?”

The skull turned eerily to track him. “Name’s Bob,” he said. “Harry ‘n me go way back.”

“Oh?”

“Yep,” Bob the Skull said brightly. “A whole bunch of things happened that I’m not allowed to remember, and then he turned sixteen and Justin tried to soulrape him, so Harry killed him and set the house on fire and took me away. We’ve been best pals ever since.”

Well. That was certainly a much more detailed version of the story than John had been able to get from any other source. Including Harry, who had once summarized his adolescence in a single sentence: “My dad died, and then I was in the system for a while, and then I lived with a guy for a few years, and then I went to stay with Eb.”

“. . . Why can’t you remember?” John asked.

“Harry told me not to,” the skull said. “He thinks it’s better if I forget.”

That explained a hell of a lot, if Harry thought he should be able to expurgate his own memory as cleanly.

Harry came out of the bathroom in a towel, hair dripping. “Hey,” he said, smiling anxiously. “You kids getting along?”

“Sure thing,” the skull chirped before John could answer. “Boss, you’ve been holding out on me. You never said Moneybags here was _hot_.”

“Hells bells, here we go,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Bob, what have I told you about sexually harassing people?”

“You said don’t do it unless they’re an agent of evil or really annoying,” the skull said promptly. “Which one is he?”

John lifted an eyebrow, very interested in the answer to that one.

“Both,” Harry snapped. “Wait. I meant neither.”

“He never tells me anything,” the skull confided, swiveling back to John. “he’s just all, ‘oh, I’m off to canoodle with my mafia kingpin love bunny, don’t wait up,’ and he never tells me any of the good bits. Like who goes on top, huh?”

“So I was wondering if I could leave him with you for a few days,” Harry said loudly. “You have a safe here, right?”

The skull turned back to Harry, and the hollow voice went abruptly flat and serious. “Boss—“

“Bob,” Harry shot back crisply. There was a beat of intensifying silence and, absurdly, a staring contest.

“I just think—“ the skull said.

“No,” Harry snapped across him. His chin was up, his shoulders back. He stood like that when he was doing serious magic. “I know, okay? But that’s enough.”

The skull snapped its remaining teeth together and pointedly rolled away.

“There’s a safe in my study,” John said carefully into a tense silence. “There’s an electronic lock, but I can deactivate that and the tumbler-lock should be just as secure.”

“Perfect,” Harry said. “Can we do that now? Just a second.”

He ducked back into the bathroom, and there were the sounds of hasty dressing. John glanced at the skull. It hadn’t moved, but its aura of unhappy fury was palpable. John was not going to get in the middle of this, whatever it was, thank you very much.

Harry came back out and wrapped the skull carefully in an old beach towel. John ushered him down to the study. Harry had never been in there before, and it was in the part of the house that hadn’t been stripped of electronics, so John left him out in the hall for a minute to turn everything off. When he stuck his head back out, Harry had partially unwrapped the skull.

“Please,” he was saying quietly. “I know you’ll do it because I told you to, but this really is how it’s got to be.”

John cleared his throat. Harry brushed past him, not looking up. He didn’t even comment on the contents of his safe – several thousand pages of printouts, half a million in low-denomination nonsequential bills, a photo album, and two dozen handguns. He nestled the skull carefully in the back corner, then swung the door shut with a bang. John slid the bookcase back over to cover it, and that was that.

“I’ll take good care of him,” he said.

That made Harry actually smile, at least. “Thank you,” he said. “I really appreciate this. It should only be a few days.”

“Is there something I should know about?” If the skull had been safe enough with Harry’s itinerant lifestyle until now, what had changed?

“Nah,” Harry said, turning his back and pacing casually away to the other side of the room. “Just keep him away from sunlight. He’ll be fine in there forever, but if – if something comes up, just don’t let him out of his skull for any reason, and be careful what he gets you to agree to.” He laughed a little. “Look who I’m talking to, of course you’ll be careful.” He turned back, smiling in that forced way again. “So anyway. Have you had dinner?”

The night was weird. John would have pried, but Harry was trying so painfully hard to act like he wasn’t upset over arguing with his skull – his friend, clearly – that John just left it alone.

And then Harry emerged from distracted thoughts late that night as they were going to bed, and pounced him. John wasn’t actually in the mood, to start with, and it was hard to meet Harry’s unexpected fervor. But John found the energy without much provocation, and after some start-stop-start miscommunications, things clicked into place with Harry on top of him, face hidden in John’s shoulder as he jerked them both off fast with his big hands.

It had been a long day, so John slept quickly and deeply. Harry woke him getting out of bed. John dozed for a while, contemplating the day. He’d never used to do this sort of thing – having someone to stay in bed for was making him lazy. What a terrible shame.

It eventually dawned on him that Harry wasn’t coming back to bed. John pushed up onto his elbows just as Harry came out of the bathroom fully dressed. He made startled eye contact, then looked away. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Sorry, go back to sleep.”

“I’m up now,” John said, swinging his feet to the floor. “Do you have time for breakfast?”

“Nope, gotta run,” Harry said, sweeping up his staff. “Got something to take care of.” He took two long steps and kissed John, hard and fast. “Later,” he said, knuckles fleetingly brushing John’s jaw. And he was gone.

Well, okay then. Harry came and went as he pleased, that was how this had always worked. It was just that lately there had been a lot more coming than going.

John worked out, had breakfast, and spent the morning in his home office, mostly on the phone. He disliked the phone. It was better than email, but he still preferred face-to-face, where he was most effective at making his point.

Hendricks took a call during lunch. “Dresden’s off the grid,” he said when he came back in. Meaning out of Chicago and, most likely, in Faerie.

“Keep me posted,” John said unnecessarily, and went out to have a series of short and pointed conversations with people who needed to be reminded exactly who ran this town.

Gard disappeared for half an hour in the afternoon; she was tense when she came back.

“Something’s up,” she said, sliding gracefully into the passenger seat of the towncar and turning to speak to him. “No one’s sure what it is yet, but it’s coming from faerie. The wildfae are apparently saying that some of the ways are closing.”

“Closing?” John repeated, startled. “I thought you can just step across anywhere, even if it’s not always a good idea.’

Gard nodded grimly. “You can. Except today, sometimes there isn’t any nevernever on the other side. It’s just gone.”

The tiny kernel of worry John had developed and shelved grew into something else entirely. “Go,” he said. “See what else you can find out.”

She didn’t come back for five hours, and at that point it was clear to everyone that something was very wrong. A thunderstorm rolled in off the lake, to the vocal astonishment of every meteorologist. That was odd, but the three inches of snow it dumped over East Highland in the middle of June was something else entirely. John was, by then, just as furious as he was worried.

Gard caught up with him as he was making the rounds of campaign fundraisers for the mayoral candidates. Not that everyone didn’t already know it was going to Emanuel. Interesting guy. He was going to be trouble; John just hadn’t figured out for whom yet.

Gard fell into step with him as he left the Hilton. “All right,” she said, “this is going to get bad. It started in Winter, but Summer’s thrown in now, too, of course. I still don’t know what, and every wildfae who can is coming through to this side.”

Like rats abandoning ship. _God damn you, Harry_.

“Let’s get bodies on the street,” John said. No one knew much about wildfae, but it was going to be a bad night, he could just tell. “Is there anyone else missing, any of Dresden’s associates?”

“Raith,” she said. “And there was a rumor Karrin Murphy was in town, but no one’s seen her today.”

“Find me someone,” John said. “Molly Carpenter, one of the werewolves, I don’t care.” He had a minuscule line of good credit built up with some of Harry’s friends; it appeared to accumulate at the rate of one civil sentence for every month Harry stayed alive. John had no problem spending it now, and then some. He stopped Gard as she turned away. “Could we get through?” he asked. “You and me and Hendricks? Maybe a dozen others?”

Her lips pressed flat. “No,” she said simply. “Nobody’s getting through that direction right now.”

No one knew a Goddamn thing. Molly Carpenter was also missing, it turned out, though Gard did some hocus pocus with one of her cached hair samples and said the girl was still on this side of the nevernever. On Demonreach, of all fucking places. John would have gone across if the lake hadn’t spontaneously turned wild enough to be completely impassible. For whatever good it might have done him, anyway: Harry’s apprentice _loathed_ him.

He braved the Carpenter home, unannounced, and was invited politely in for coffee.

“I don’t know,” Michael said, sitting quietly across from him at their enormous, hand-carved kitchen table. “They don’t always confide in me, these days.” He said it serenely. Did the man know how to be bitter?

“I’ll let you know when I hear anything,” John said, and moved on to the werewolves.

“No idea,” Billy Borden said, shaking his head. “He’s been close-mouthed lately. More than usual, I mean. I’ve been assuming that was because of you.”

Harry’s weird little medical examiner friend didn’t stop shaking through their entire two minute conversation.

“No, nothing,” he said. “Except that he called me yesterday to be sure I’d be in town for the next week or so. Which usually means he thinks he might need emergency stitches or something.”

“Thank you,” John said, and signaled Hendricks off his threatening loom. “Here’s my card. If he contacts you, I’m your first call. Immediately.”

The little guy’s lip curled. “If he says it’s cool, then yeah,” he said on a burst of bravado. But he took the card, which was all John could hope for at this point.

He had no way of reaching any of the wardens on short notice, and they’d universally tell him to fuck off, anyway. It was late. John went home.

“It’s the solstice,” Gard said into the silence as they drove. “The height of summer’s power.”

As of eight minutes ago by the dashboard clock, at least in this time zone. “I know,” John said. That was no coincidence; Harry had planned this. But he’d already known that.

He went straight to the safe when he got home. The skull woke up in his hands this time, the instant John unwrapped it.

“Oh, you,” Bob said, obviously disappointed.

“He’s not back yet,” John said. “What do you know?”

“Sorry, no dice,” the skull said.

“He’s in faerie, I know that,” John said. “I assume he’s trying to break from Winter.” He’d _known_ this was coming, that was the real kicker. There was no way Harry would let it lie. John had just assumed – well, he’d thought a lot of things that were turning out to be wrong.

The skull was silent.

John set it carefully in the middle of his desk and sat down. “Let me be clear about this,” he said. “I don’t know how to hurt you, but I can think of a half dozen possibilities off the top of my head. I will keep trying them until one works, and then I will hurt you until you tell me what I want to know.”

The skull whistled. “Nice,” it said. “I like the menace and sincerity, and bonus points for the crazy eyes.”

“We’ll start with heat,” John said, and went to stand.

“Don’t bother,” the skull said, losing the mocking tone in a snap. “It won’t do any good, I still can’t tell you.”

“Can’t,” John repeated.

“Yep.” The skull rocked forward and back, a disquieting nod. “Boss said no, so I can’t. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. Which, by the way, is a fucking terrible idea. You might be making sweet sweet love to him, but you lay a finger on me?” He made a _ffft-POW_ noise, like a bomb.

“I really don’t care right now,” John said.

“Yeah.” The skull rocked again, and John had the odd impression that he’d earned its respect in the last few minutes, somehow. “I hear you. At this point, I’d probably tell you if I could.”

“Hmm,” John said slowly, replaying everything he could remember from last night. Not a happy skull, no. “Why exactly did he leave you here, can you tell me that?”

“Sure. I’m the messenger skull. There’s this whole big thing I’m supposed to tell you if he’s not back in another—“ it sucked breath between its non-existent lips “—seventy-one hours and twelve minutes. And no, I can’t tell you early.”

John dropped his head into his hands, exhausted and pissed off and terrified. “That _son-of-a-bitch_ ,” he said quietly.

“Sing it,” said the skull.

John catnapped for a few hours, then worked out, and ate, and napped again. Gard came in and out with tidbits of news, all useless.

It was a bad night for the western hemisphere, and particularly for Chicago. Pockets of freak microweather pounded the city, and the terrified wildfae were a force of chaotic, largely accidental violence. John went out with one of his street teams for a few hours, doing what they could to keep control.

He came home after dawn, as things seemed to be settling a bit. He did office work for a while, mostly paper pushing, then got up to go out again. He hadn’t made it through the full list of corrective little visits yesterday.

Hendricks stopped him with an extended hand, not quite touching him.

“Not a good idea,” he said mildly.

John’s jaw worked. “I didn’t ask for your opinion,” he said.

Hendricks didn’t move. “Yeah, exactly,” he said. “Johnny, seriously. You’re not rational right now.”

John breathed in, breathed out, and backed down. “You’re right. Thank you.”

There was never a shortage of work that needed doing. John settled down to a sea of administrivia, a safe paper barrier between everyone else and him. He kept Bob on his desk like an over-the-top paperweight. The skull was mostly quiet, the light coming and going from its eyes.

“You could let me out tonight,” he said in the early afternoon. “I can go scouting, see what I can see.”

John set down his pen, seriously considering it. Harry had warned him against this, but he would accept any tool that might be useful. “Could you get into the nevernever?” he asked.

There was a very small pause. “Technically . . . yeah,” Bob said. “In the sense that I could have done it if the Boss hadn’t told me I couldn’t.”

“Of all the times for him to plan ahead,” John said.

“Well, he’s not completely wrong about that one,” Bob said. “Mab may, uh, have this teeny weenie yen to cast me into the pits of hell to suffer eternal torment. The Boss gets weird about that sort of thing. Protective, you know?”

“Hmm,” John said. In his current frame of mind, he didn’t really believe that was why _he_ had been on the list of people left on this side of the barrier.

He ate dinner alone. He paced. He worked. He went to the shooting range. He worked some more. He napped briefly on the couch in the media room.

He went back into his study a little after two in the morning. “No news,” he said as Bob’s lights flared up. “It’s a quieter night.” Whether that was good or bad, he didn’t know. There was a little over forty-six hours left on Bob’s clock before John would have to hear whatever Harry wanted to say from the safety of probable death.

“He meant for me to go to you, I think,” Bob said. “If he doesn’t come back.”

John swallowed his first, inarticulately furious response to that. “I’m flattered,” he said.

“You should be.” Bob rattled emphatically. “It’s the big trust. This is, like, letting you go bareback, okay?”

“Oh, is that what this is?” John said sarcastically. They eyed each other from opposite sides of the desk, hostile and a little lost. _What the fuck am I supposed to do with you_? John thought, and imagined that Bob was wondering the exact same thing.

Gard jerked him out of an uncomfortable doze on top of the covers a little after four.

“Got him,” she said, coming in with a fast knock. “He got through to this side, fuck knows how.”

“Where?” John asked. He was still dressed; he only had to shove his feet into his shoes.

“Here,” Gard said. “Hendricks is calling a doctor.”

“Understood,” John said, forewarned.

They were coming up through the backyard from the direction of Harry’s usual exit from the nevernever. John met them halfway across the lawn. Harry was in the middle of their little knot, his arms thrown around Raith on one side and Murphy on the other. His staff poked up over one shoulder, and the hilt of a silver sword – a warden’s sword – over the other. The three of them were lurching forward unevenly; they looked like they were running on sheer cussedness at this point. Mouse limped ahead, only putting weight on three paws.

“Good boy,” John said quietly to him, touching the big head in passing.

“. . . had to come here,” Murphy was saying as John approached. “Jesus fucking Christ, Dresden, we could have just found a football field to run up and down for a few hours if you wanted some exercise.”

John stepped up next to her. “Can I cut in?”

She glanced briefly up at him just as someone switched on the outside floodlights. The whole right side of her face was a sheet of blood. “Can’t,” she said briefly. “If I wasn’t propping him up, I’d fall over.” John recognized the hilt of her sword, too. It was very plain, but then again there was nothing wasted or ornamental about her loyalty, either.

Harry looked over at them, his head turning creakily. “Hey,” he said, smiling like a moron.

“Do _not_ say something witty and self-deprecating,” John said lowly.

“What?” Harry said, voice rasping. “‘it was lotsa fun storming the castle,’ you mean like that?”

Everyone made it up the back patio steps and into the formal living room, where whatever precarious internal balance had kept the three of them upright gave out. The doctor was there to triage, though, and John would only be in the way. So he started making lists of things that needed doing, and working down them.

He called the Carpenters to say they could likely expect their daughter home as soon as the lake settled, and asked them to start a phone tree to other interested parties. He sent a car for Butters to utilize his potential expertise in wizard healing. Then he spent half an hour sitting in a spreading pool of blood on the kitchen floor with Mouse’s right foreleg in his lap, carefully extracting long shards of glass from his shoulder and side and leg to make him more comfortable while they waited for the vet. Mouse cried quietly throughout, but he was preternaturally docile under John’s hands.

“Mab’s dead,” Gard reported, sticking her head in briefly. “Or permanently incapacitated, it comes to the same thing. There’s going to be a succession fight, and Summer is already moving in. Might be a spot of war.”

John nodded, not looking up from his careful work with the tweezers. The satisfaction was savage. “So he did it, then,” he said. “He’s not the Winter Knight anymore. Go tell that to the skull you’ll find on my desk in the study, please.”

Raith was already gone when John was done with Mouse.

“He said he needed to go eat someone,” Hendricks reported laconically. “I made a strategic assessment and decided I wasn’t going to get in his way.”

Murphy had been packed off to the hospital with a head injury, and the vet had just arrived to see to Mouse. All right.

He met Gard in the hall, coming out of the guest room where they’d put Harry. “He’ll live,” she said, closing her box of little tiles with care. “He’s a mess, though. Tortured, I would guess – all the small bones in his right hand are broken, to start with.”

John nodded his thanks and passed her in silence. Harry was on his side with his back turned. John went around the foot of the bed and stood, quietly, watching while one of his doctors on retainer poked delicately at Harry’s grossly swollen hand.

“He’s out,” the doctor said, not looking up. Barely true, to John’s eye – Harry’s face twisted, tension and pain working at him beneath a thin layer of sleep.

“How bad?”

The doctor rattled through a laundry list of injuries – the broken bones; a dislocated elbow on the same side; deep puncture wounds on his back; massive damage that looked like burns but were, and he did not feel qualified to speculate on how this was possible, stripes of tissue death from rapid freezing and thawing; cuts and bruises; and on. “Hospital would be better,” he finished, checking John’s expression.

“No,” John said.

“. . . Right,” the Doctor said. John felt no need to correct his belief that John had ordered this, if not done it himself.

Harry moved restlessly. The doctor hissed in irritation, hunching closer. “I can barely set most of these as it is,” he said. “And without x-rays, I can’t say whether he should have surgery.”

John went back around to the other side of the bed and held Harry down. He was cold. John watched his face; he wasn’t throwing off any destructive magic. But if he’d been fighting for his life this whole time, he might be completely tapped out.

Harry was helpless under his hands. John leaned into his holds, thinking it through. If Harry had been a dog, this would be the perfect time to snap a collar on him. As it was, there was no such immediately satisfying way to control him. Gard might be able to bind him, but John suspected that if it was going to work at all, it would have to be something as extreme as burning his magic out or not allowing him to heal properly. And that would defeat the purpose – what he’d have when it was done wouldn’t be what he wanted.

This was a narrow window. Harry never would have slept with him if he hadn’t been sworn to Mab. It was almost as if he’d needed protection, like belonging to someone else insulated him. Except now he was free again, and John had one clear shot.

John hesitated. He’d never stopped wanting to get a leash on Harry. But somehow the meaning of wanting to have him had changed. He was so far from rational, he could only dimly remember what it felt like. God _damn_ Dresden.

John held Harry down and watched the doctor pulling slim spikes of eerily unmelting ice out of him, and waited.

*

I hurt. It was bad. Not the worst pain of my life, though, and that meant if I needed to move, I could. Did I need to move?

“. . . heals _better_ more than he heals faster,” someone was saying. “He regenerated his hand basically from a lump of fused charcoal, but it took years.” Butters, that’s who it was. So we’d made it out of faerie. Huh. I really hadn’t expected that.

Someone answered Butters. I wasn’t tracking well enough to understand the words, but I knew it was John.

“Right,” Butters said. “As far as I know, he’s always refused surgery for anything.”

John answered, briefly, and there was . . . something in his voice.

“Uh-huh,” Butters said. “You realize he can’t exactly fight back right now?”

“Good,” John said. “Thank you. Get out.”

I went under for a while, and when I woke up again the pain had resolved itself from one huge, looming thing into a whole choir of specific hurts: my back, my ribs, my knee, my throat, my _hand_. I was on some heavy-duty shit – I recognized that dizzy nausea.

I was ambitious enough to open my eyes. I got a dose of blank white wall for my trouble, and turning my head wasn’t going to happen.

Someone moved in the room, and John appeared. He was carrying a cup with a long straw.

“Water,” he said. “And then you can have more pills.”

“What if I don’t want more pills?” I croaked. John makes me contrary. It’s an instinct, what can I say.

His mouth flattened out. “Then I’ll call in Hendricks to hold you while I force them down your throat,” he said. “Though I could probably manage you with one hand at this point.”

I coughed painfully. “Are you trying . . . to turn me on?”

He didn’t smile. “Your hand is a mess.”

“No surgery.” I licked my lips. “I’ll heal. I always do.”

He tilted the straw and I drank. Water! I didn’t know how bad I needed it until the tissues of my mouth practically absorbed it. John pulled the cup back long before I was done.

“Hey,” I said, with lots of wizardly irritation and authority. Or maybe a pathetic wine, it could go either way.

“Morphine first,” he said, and came in fast with two tablets between his fingers.

“Wait wait,” I blurted. “Everyone okay?”

“Ms. Murphy has been treated for cuts and a head injury and released. I haven’t heard from Raith, but he was better off than either of you. Mouse is sleeping. _He_ took his pills like a good boy.”

“. . . Okay,’ I said, laboriously working through what felt like a lot of information. John gave me the tablets, one at a time, offering me the straw after each. I swallowed and drank, swallowed and drank, and he stared at me.

“. . . And you?” I said, because it suddenly seemed like a relevant question.

John put the water cup down out of my narrow sightline. “Did you think I would take advantage of you?” he asked mildly. “Did you think I would, what, force you to be my personal hitwizard in exchange for help?”

“Huh?” I said.

John pursed his lips, thoughtful. “Or did you think you were trading yourself for resources? That you would be my whore?”

“The hell I am,” I said. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but that never stopped me answering him before.

“I’m just trying to understand,” he said, all reasonable like _I_ was the one not making sense. “Because I’m running out of explanations here, so I’m left with the realization that you are _staggeringly_ stupid.”

“Hey,” I said. And then a circuit fired off and I realized that we were having a fight here. Well, Marcone was fighting and I was making confused noises. “Wait a second,” I said, because I will quite possibly rise from the dead to fight with him. “Back up. The fuck is your problem?”

He gave me the most unimpressed look in his big repertoire of them, with extra drama. I half expected him to huff that if I didn’t know already, he wasn’t going to tell me.

And then he just . . . disengaged. The fuck? I’d seen him shut people down like that all the time, like they weren’t worth his anger. But he didn’t do that with me, not ever. I was always worth being pissed at, he was always ready to fight with me. Until now.

I started to sit. I’d actually scraped up enough energy from somewhere to get annoyed. “Okay,” I started, “what the—“ and then I put my right hand down to balance myself, and everything went away for a while behind a red haze of agony. I kept waiting to pass out, for my brain to pull the plug on this, but it just wouldn’t. So I rode it out, letting the pain flow through me and over me and around me or whatever it is you’re supposed to do, so long as it would _stop_.

It ebbed eventually. I had collapsed awkwardly to my side, and Marcone was hovering over me, watching the whole thing.

“. . . Ow,” I said faintly.

He reached down in silence and pushed me back into my original position. With two fingers, because he’s an asshole like that.

“You’re going back to sleep,” he said. “When you wake up, you’re going to try and get some calories down. After that, you’re going to hold still while we get your hand into a cast. And then you’re going to sleep again.”

I opened my mouth to object. Not to the program, though it did sound kind of exhausting, but to the delivery.

“And _don’t_ tell me to go fuck myself or try to crawl back to one of your bolt holes just to prove to me that I have no hold over you,” he said quietly. “Believe me, I am _perfectly well aware of that_.”

I was still working on that one when unconsciousness swamped me again.

Things went pretty much exactly like he’d said they would. That was one of his more annoying habits, right there. I devoured some soup, and then fought to keep it down for hours through a fitful sleep. Then the doctor was there; I’d apparently met him before, but I didn’t remember any of that.

John came in to personally make sure I held still while a couple of guys did a lot of really fucking awful things to my hand.

“Okay,” I said through my teeth after ten minutes. “The guy who broke it in the first place at least did it _faster than this_.”

Except as soon as I said it, I remembered that no, actually, he hadn’t. I broke out in a clammy sweat all over, and my skin seemed to shrink a few sizes.

John said something, but I wasn’t really parsing. I closed my eyes and just . . . went away for a while, until they stopped hurting me.

Time did funny things after that. I slept and ate, failed to sleep and threw up all over myself. At some point, there was the great accomplishment of a trip to the bathroom; the exertion put me back on my ass in bed for so long that I was stiff when I woke up again.

There were stars out my window, and I was alone for the first time I could remember. I felt awful. More than just the expected physical stuff, I mean – I felt bad all the way down. The word would be ‘unsound,’ I think. I could remember . . . I could remember pouring out soulfire, hemorrhaging it like arterial blood until I knew I would die of it, and then rupturing even more. After that, my soul seemed to rattle hollowly inside me, like a marble in a jar. I was surprised there was a me left to think about this at all. Cogito ergo still kicking.

I rolled carefully onto my side. There was a glass of water on my nightstand, and a pitcher and tissues and stuff like that. My hand was in a cast from forearm to fingertips. They must have cut my rings off. I was glad I didn’t remember that part.

My other hand was bare. I crooked one finger at the tissue box and mouthed “forzare.”

I regained consciousness in a little puddle of cooling blood on my pillow. It felt like I’d been striking matches on the inside of my skull. Hell’s bells. I sat up by inches, clutched my knees, and finally managed to tilt my head back and pinch my nose until the bleeding stopped.

Okay, not so much with the magic then.

I sat there for a while, feeling shitty. Eventually I eased my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up, hanging onto the nightstand until the loop-de-loops passed. If I’d made it to the bathroom, then I could make it to the door. And if I could make it to the door, I could make it into the hall. And if I could make it into the hall, I would know exactly where I was.

I was panting and shaking by the time I got out the door. I wouldn’t have minded so much, except there were two guys with fucking assault rifles standing out there. I stared. They didn’t stare back – they were doing that constant eye motion, situational awareness security thing.

Those were the biggest guns I’d ever seen in my life. I just . . . wasn’t going to ask.

John’s suite was ten feet down the hall. I could do that. No problem. . . . And if big gun guys wanted to stop me, then they could damn well carry me back to bed.

They didn’t. John’s bedroom was dark when I opened the door. I knew my way around, so I left it that way. Though in my current state I probably could have turned on the overhead electric light without exploding anything. Unlike lighting the dozens of candles he left out for me.

Sheets rustled as I closed the door.

“Yes?” John said in that instantaneously alert way he had. “. . . Ah,” he added, flipping on a lamp and staring at me.

“Um,” I said. “I have this idea that you’re pissed at me, but I’d really appreciate it if you could sit on it for a while. Scoot over?”

“Pissed does not even begin to cover it,” he said, and lifted the blankets for me. I practically fell in beside him. “Idiot,” he said, reaching across to prop a long pillow behind my back and then to find another for my throbbing hand.

“No, not like that,” I said. “C’mere.”

We shuffled around until we were pressed as close as we could get, with my hand tucked safely between us and both his arms around me.

“You’re so warm,” I murmured, burrowing into his neck. It was June, and I had the vague idea that it was a hot night – John wasn’t wearing much. But I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been cold to the bone.

He rubbed my back carefully, his stubbled cheek resting on my temple. It was more comfortable than it should have been, but neither of us went to sleep.

“So,” I said eventually into the underside of his jaw. “What’s up with the muscle in the hall?”

John’s hand paused momentarily, then resumed its rhythm between my shoulder blades. “A precaution against reprisals,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey, yeah, there are a couple thousand beings who’d like to eat my entrails right now, good point.”

“Thank you,” John said with enough sarcasm to fell a tree at thirty paces. “You know, there is an entire sect of monks somewhere who believe in divine intervention because that’s the only explanation for the miracle of your continued existence.”

I snorted; it hurt. “Not wrong,” I said.

“. . . Ah,” John said.

“Anyway,” I said quickly. “What’re the goons really going to do? Any of the high court fae would go right through them.”

I felt John smile against my hair, and without looking I knew it was the extra toothy one. “The rifles have been modified to shoot iron pellets,” he said.

I whistled. “Nice.”

“Some men have also trained with iron throwing knives and powdered iron filings,” he continued. “And their reload cartridges have slugs that Gard runed. She’s only made a few hundred specifically for faeries, so they’re an emergency measure for the moment.”

“Hang on,” I said slowly. “A couple hundred?”

I wouldn’t have been able to sense his tension if I wasn’t plastered all over him. “Yes.”

“And modified rifles – how many of those, exactly?”

“Only sixty.”

“And stockpiles of the iron stuff, I assume?” He nodded silently. “. . . Oh,” I said, drawing it out. “So that’s it. You’re pissed at me because I didn’t let you play with your shiny new toys.”

Something happened in the following silence. It was weird enough to make me lift my head, which was a massive effort, thank you.

“Um,” I said. Holy crap, it might be that what was called for right now was actual sincerity. “. . . Sorry?”

“I’ve just been waiting for you to give the word,” John said. “And then you didn’t. Why?”

“Hang on,” I said. “I have to think about that.” He puffed in disbelief. “No, seriously. I haven’t thought about any of this. I _couldn’t_ \-- she would have known.” I’d just had an intention, but that was okay, because she expected that. And once in a while I had tiny, fleeting thoughts about how it might be done, which I instantly buried. And even more rarely I’d let an innocuous fragment surface, something out of context, and pass it on to Molly or Murphy or Thomas to take care of. And John hadn’t been a part of that.

“You don’t trust me,” John said.

I was worn down to animal reactions and honesty; I didn’t have the resources to lie to him. And what was the point, anyway? “I don’t,” I said. “And I do.” To be smart and efficient and as ruthless to himself as he was to others, and to be the best lay I’d ever had, yeah I trusted him. But. “You have an agenda,” I said. “I can feel it. You’re always running the numbers.”

“That’s because I am,” he said, unashamed. “But I thought I had already made myself clear to you.” I looked away. He had, mostly. And I’d just . . . let it keep hanging out there. I didn’t think he was lying about what he wanted from me anymore, but that didn’t mean I actually believed him, it turned out. “You keep testing me,” he said. “And I will keep jumping through your hoops if that’s how it needs to be.”

“I do not,” I said.

He gave me a _look_. “Having me pick you up from that game you play with dice and dragons, and leaving me alone in the kitchen with four werewolves? Letting Raith take off his gloves and touch you skin-to-skin in front of me so you could watch what I’d do? Leaving your bag sitting obviously out to see if I’d go through it? Asking your apprentice to—“

“Okay, okay,” I said hastily. “You’ve made your point.” And apparently he had a point to make, though I hadn’t ever thought about it as testing. In those terms, he’d passed every time: he’d come through a lot of werewolf posturing and snarling with a polite smile, and asked if Thomas wanted to stay for dinner, and never gone anywhere near my portable spellwork supplies, even though he was as fascinated as Michael’s kids were with dinosaurs.

But of course he would pass if he’d seen right through all of it. How was I supposed to trust him when he knew me so well? And when the _fuck_ had he learned to know me so well?

“I just don’t understand what ignoring resources and not asking me for help was supposed to accomplish,” he said.

I was shaking with exhaustion and cold, but I did have an answer for him now. Only, it was kind of embarrassing. “Okay,,” I said, “you just have to promise not to laugh.”

“All right,” he said, clearly disconcerted.

“I wasn’t protecting you,” I said. “Not quite. I just liked that you didn’t know what I was planning. I liked that I could . . . leave it at the door.”

He didn’t laugh, but he was pulling a very incredulous face. “You were treating me like your little woman,” he said, without inflection.

“Shut up, I was not,” I said.

“That is so idiotic, I don’t even have words,” he said wonderingly.

“Stop Monday-morning quarterbacking,” I grumbled. “It worked, didn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything, he just stared at me.

“. . . Shut up,” I muttered, and carefully rested my throbbing head against his shoulder again. There was a pause, this one a lot more comfortable. “It wouldn’t have helped,” I said eventually. “Three was already two too many, it turned out.” She’d seen us coming miles out, and just let us walk right into her hands.

John hummed noncommittally. He was thinking if he’d been there, he would have made it work, I could practically smell it.

I snuffled sleepily into the join of his neck and shoulder. His stupid designer shower gel smelled _amazing_.

“You don’t trust me either, I’d like to point out,” I said.

There was a brief, considering pause. “I trust that you will always do what you think is right,” he said. “But no, otherwise I don’t.” He puffed irritably. “I can always feel you, _not_ running the numbers.”

And of course that was the thing that he couldn’t stand. “Sorry I didn’t pick you for the cool kids team,” I said after a while. “I’ll give you my cookies at lunch if you’ll make up with me.”

“Go to sleep,” John said.

*

The summer happened while I wasn’t paying attention. I measured life in eating and sleeping and hurting. I could not get warm, not for all the blankets and microwavable heating pads in the world. Butters came by, watched me shiver for a while, and said yep, the whosit in my brain that should be regulating my temperature sure looked busted.

“Wow, thanks,” I said. “What can I do about that?”

He shrugged. “Wait. And if it doesn’t fix itself, see an expert. But you want my bet? It’s like Winter withdrawal.”

He was probably right. I’d lived in a bubble of chilly imperviousness for a year, with ice magic at my fingertips. That was gone now, and my body needed to readjust.

And it felt fitting. Like the external manifestation of an internal hurt. I felt like I had no cushion, no insulation. And I guess I didn’t – I’d used it all up, and I knew it would be a long time coming back. Whatever I hadn’t poured out of me in extremis had been stripped away later by the magical backlash. I’d broken an oath – I’d stuck a sword through my sworn Queen. There were consequences for that.

I felt sensitive all the time, either wobbly or ridiculously irritable. I don’t remember a lot of it now. And I’m not sure about some things I do remember, if they’re real or just weird dreams. There’s a fuzzy impression of being in bed late at night, bleeding from my nose and shaking and shaking. And John holding me down, leaning into my face to talk quietly to me. “It’s over,” he said, again and again. “It’s all over. You got out. You’re okay. Take a breath.”

He stuck close to me for a bit. That helped with the cold thing. Nothing felt better than curling up against his back, and I knew it was doing more for me than just warming me up.

But at the same time, I didn’t want him around. I didn’t want anyone around.

Which was a problem, because everyone wanted to see me: Molly and Thomas and the Alphas and Bob and even Ramirez on his way through town. All of them trooping through John’s bedroom would have been kind of hilarious under other circumstances. As it was, they exhausted me and sort of rubbed at tender places just by being in the same room.

And then they stopped coming, all at once, and John started disappearing for long stretches during the day. It was an unspeakable relief to be alone.

Except for Mouse: he came in and slept in the sun on John’s deep bedroom carpeting. His leg looked pretty bad, but John said he was going to be okay. Mouse was a good healer, instinctively, like animals are. I tried to emulate his inward turn, his patience, his endless naps.

One morning I took a real shower, and a couple days after that I made it all the way down to the kitchen to get my own food, instead of sending one of John’s goons. And a few days after that, I went out onto the back patio and baked in the sun for a while.

Eventually I woke up one morning and I wanted to do something. Something other than go right back to sleep, I mean. I thought about going for a walk, and then I just figured hey, if I was doing that anyway, it might as well be productive.

So I grabbed my staff and Luccio’s sword – really should return that – and ambled down to the backyard. Mouse tried to follow, painfully, but I told him to stay until it stuck. There weren’t as many goons around anymore, but I still probably freaked out the pair on the back porch when I cut my way into the nevernever and vanished.

It was a quick trip to Demonreach. My usual route had always been deserted before, and my luck held.

Mister had been on the island all spring, eating I don’t know what and generally taking to an undomestic life with terrifying ease. He was glad to see me, though. I sat in the sun for a while, getting reacquainted and resting up, then poked through all the stuff I’d left there. It had only been, what? A month since I’d visited? I didn’t even know what day it was, but it couldn’t have been too long. But I felt like I was going through a stranger’s things, excavating his mysteriously idiosyncratic magical caches.

I gathered up a bunch of things almost at random, then opened the flap of my backpack. Mister deigned to crawl in after I promised him the one thing he couldn’t get out here, a nice cold Coke.

I realized I’d overdone it halfway back, and by the time I stepped through to the lawn, I was running on fumes. I trudged across the grass, leaning on my staff, focused only on getting horizontal.

John appeared out of nowhere at the bottom of the patio steps, scaring the hell out of me.

“Gah!” I said, nearly tripping. John steadied me two-handed. He was in a suit, and I wasn’t sure what he was doing home in the middle of the morning.

“You went into faerie,” he said.

I shrugged. “Yeah?”

His jaw flexed. “Did it occur to you that maybe that wasn’t a good idea?”

I polled my way up the steps on my staff. “Nope. Worked out fine.”

John stuck with me. “Or that you should have Gard go with you?”

I shoved my backpack at him. “Carry this, would you?” He hooked it over his arm without missing a beat.

“Or, at the bare minimum, to tell a single person where you were going and when you might – Harry. This bag is _moving_.”

“Yeah,” I said, and reached over to unzip it. Mister’s furry head popped out; John blinked, weighing the bag with a flex of his arm and an impressed face.

“My cat,” I said. “Mister, John. John, Mister.”

Mister launched himself straight from the bag to the back of the sofa, an easy six foot leap. “That is _not_ a cat,” John said, staring.

“Well, no, but it’s not nice to inquire too closely into what someone’s mother got up to,” I said. “Look, I can toss him out in the yard if you want, he’ll be fine.”

“No no,” John said. “One more in the menagerie is no problem.” Mouse limped in, painfully hangdog. “Maybe out of the three of you, the cat is the one with sense,” John said pointedly to him. Then back to me, “Was the nevernever stable?”

“Nap,” I said, yawning. “Later.” I dropped onto the sofa, kicked off my boots, and went instantaneously to sleep.

The sun had tipped past noon when I woke up again. I stretched carefully, testing my body. Not bad, comparatively speaking. Could use some grub, though.

I heard John talking in the kitchen all the way down the hall.

“. . . niche market, if salvia is criminalized,” he was saying. “But that’s just a question of expanding existing distribution channels. It’s only going to exacerbate the laundering volume problem, but there really is a hard limit to how much real estate I can acquire in one year. But I’d still rather increase my local infrastructure investment footprint, instead of dumping it all into some trendy exchange traded fund.” He was standing at the bay window, minus his jacket, with a coffee cup in one hand and Mister, all thirty plus pounds of him, tucked casually in the other arm.

“Are you seriously talking business to my cat?” I asked.

“Why not?” he said, turning around. “Mouse always seems to understand everything he hears.”

“Mouse is special,” I said.

He joggled Mister gently. “You talk to him.”

“Well yeah,” I said. “That’s because he’s a cat and I’m not dumb.” I went to pour a cup of coffee for myself, bracing it with my useless casted hand.

“Hungry?” John asked, then nudged me toward a bar stool at the big central island when I nodded. He took out a carton of eggs, three different blocks of cheese, peppers, an onion, mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach, and ham. I would eventually start busting the appliances again, but for the moment it was really nice to know there would always be a working refrigerator.

“What’d you mean about the nevernever being unstable?” I asked, leaning my chin on my hands.

His knife skills were alarmingly precise. “Apparently things have been – Gard called it ‘dimensionally unstable.’ She’s been reluctant to go across.”

“Well, now we know it’s fine,” I said. “At least locally.” I paused. “Was there a war while I wasn’t paying attention?”

The knife blade flashed as he rapidly cubed ham. “More of a . . . brawl,” he said. “A lot of the details are unclear, but Maeve has been supplanted by – her name was the Leanansidhe?”

“Oh Christ,” I said involuntarily. “Okay, the next time you pray, you want to add a bit about how you never ever want to meet my faerie godmother.” She had helped us out in the end, though. And now I knew why. I should get in touch with Lily or Fix, or even some of my acquaintances among the lesser Winter fae. But at the moment, the thought just made me tired.

I watched him sautéing vegetables for a while. “So,” I said eventually. “just how pissed is everyone at you for keeping them away from me?”

He smiled with half his mouth. “There were some threats made,” he said. “I believe some discussion of burning me in effigy on my own lawn.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, translating this into some really fucking unpleasant scenes. He’d played right into the worst of their fears, cutting me off from them like that. But stars, I was grateful. “I’ll fix it.” Eventually. “Thanks.”

He nodded silently, and cracked the eggs. He turned out beautiful fat omelets, and kept shoving fresh fruit at me until I was full. Temporarily, anyway – I couldn’t seem to get enough to eat for more than an hour or two.

“Okay,” I said, wiping my mouth when I was done. “Here’s me being sensible and planning ahead like you’re always saying. Catch me if I pass out, okay?” I pointed across the room at the dish towel. “Forzare.”

The magic burned me coming out, but the towel flipped off the rack. I reeled back; it felt like the recoil of a big gun. John’s arm snapped out behind me and I leaned into it, woozy.

“Score,” I said.

“You’re bleeding again,” John said, all disapproval like it was a personal moral failing.

“Well yeah. But I’m conscious, so we’re counting it as a win.”

John was gone when I woke up the next morning. But my busted shield bracelet was on the bedside table, along with the remains of my force rings.

That evening, I tracked down Gard on the back patio. She was sitting on the steps, puffing meditatively at a clove cigarette. She offered me one, and I figured what the hell, and accepted. I hadn’t smoked in years, not since a bit of pointless rebelling at Eb’s, but the knack came back.

“You need something?” Gard asked, watching the twilight roll in over John’s ridiculous back yard.

“Metalworking supplies,” I said. “Do you do any of that here?”

She blew out a perfect ring; most people couldn’t manage that with an actual pipe, but Gard was badass that way. “In the basement,” she said. Of course. We practitioners were a lot more alike than we ever wanted to admit. “And if you need anything else, just let me know.”

I tracked down her bare bones lab the next day. Our magical disciplines were very different, but a lot of the nonmagical necessities were the same. I did okay melting down the remains of my rings, but it turned out to be all but impossible to successfully recast them with one hand. So I got rid of the cast the obvious way, though I didn’t really want to know why one of John’s guys could lay his hands on a hacksaw so readily. The skin beneath was still green and purple, my thumb was crooked, and my bones were lumpy where they really shouldn’t have been. But I could move all the fingers and flex the palm with only moderate pain, and that was good enough for me.

John had a fit of the vapors when he saw it that night. “That was supposed to stay on for another three weeks at least,” he said, horrified.

“I’ve always done this with casts,” I said, waving the hand to demonstrate its wholeness. “I don’t run to schedule, news at eleven.”

Later that week, I actually woke up when John got out of bed to go work out. “Think I’ll run today,” I said, stretching.

John came with me, even though I’d picked up the idea somewhere that he really hated running, and he’d much rather be lifting weights or doing yoga. I was still getting over that one. Just weird mental images, you know?

He didn’t have much to worry about that morning – I barely made it a mile before I had to turn around and walk back. All my quieted aches and pains had come back to screaming life, and I apparently had no wind anymore.

“Tomorrow?” I said grimly to John, and he nodded his agreement.

I felt like the world was coming back into focus. Or maybe like I was expanding to fill it again. John was the first to come back to me in full color, and then Bob, and Mouse, and Mister, and Gard in the late evenings with her generous cigarette supply and her comfortable silences. I worked my way out from there to a beer with Thomas at Mac’s, and then Sunday dinner at the Carpenters’.

I wasn’t keeping track of time. John and I went out in the early morning to run one Sunday. I was improving fast, and he was starting to have to work to keep up with me. We did a quick six mile loop around his property, not talking. It was a good day – the exercise got my blood working in the old, clean way, without any of the sudden bouts of nausea or panic I’d had in the past few months. And when we got back to the house, and John started stripping off his damp t-shirt, I looked at him and thought _yeah, I want me some of that_ , for the first time in a really long time.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a while, enjoying having that back. Then I followed him into the shower and got me some of that. We ended up going back to bed for a second round, slower after the wham-bam groping under the hot water.

“What do you want?” he asked, carefully moving my sore hand above my head.

“Uh, not that,” I said, twitching my wrist out of his hold. “Sorry. Just . . . can’t.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding seriously, and I knew he’d just made a note in my fucking file or something. “Can I . . .?”

And he sucked me off so long and so good, I had to blink tears out of my eyes when I came. John doesn’t have a single hang up about blowing another guy. John doesn’t have many sexual hang-ups, as far as I can tell. I’d eventually figured out that he liked doing absolutely anything that would make me lose it. And I refuse to let him get the best of me in anything, so I didn’t have many hang ups these days, either.

“Okay, what do _you_ want?” I asked, breathless and smiling.

“Can I fuck you?” he asked.

"Sure," I said, stretching liquidly. ". . . What?"

He looked . . nervous? “I’ve always been scrupulous,” he said, and laughed a little. “You’d say obsessive. And I have clear test results from just last week.”

“Huh?” I said blankly.

He rolled his eyes. “Condoms,” he said. “Do we need them?”

“Oh, stars, of course you have freaking _documentation_ ,” I said. I didn’t, but he couldn’t actually catch anything off me. “Yeah, sure, whatever, go for it.”

It was nice without the condom. Though to judge by John’s reactions, it was amazing. He fucked me like he was test driving a new car – slow and deep, and fast and hard, then easing back down again. It felt really goddamn good, even though I could only work up half a hard on for all his efforts.

John stayed close after, touching me with restless hands and kissing my neck, my shoulder, my cheek. “Thank you,” he murmured, which was taking this whole gentleman thing a little far if you asked me.

Wait, hold the phone. Were we having a moment? We were totally having a moment. I belatedly remembered that condoms were a really big deal for people who could actually catch most venereal diseases. I’d always found John’s insistence on them vaguely annoying. I’d never bothered before except to prevent pregnancy, and I’d either been with wizard women who could manage that part on their own, or Susan who, well, I think the technical term is _oops_.

But this mattered to him.

“My pleasure,” I said, catching up to his mood. Because, well, it was.

We lay in silence for a while. And then I said, the words coming out as the thought occurred, “I think I want to run the marathon.”

John blinked lazily at me. “You realize that’s in October, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, warming to the idea the more I thought about it. “I think I can do it. I used to run nearly half the distance three times a week. I trained for it when I was twenty five, but then I couldn’t run because I was out-of-town on a job. I’m sure I can get back there in time. I mean, if you think about it, it’s just twenty miles with a 10K chaser.”

John was making an appalled face. “I don’t think I’ll be joining you for that,” he said. “I’d honestly rather shoot myself in the head.”

“To each his own,” I said magnanimously.

*

  


  
**October 31**   


The running was great. Well, no, that’s a lie, the running was a long miserable push with occasional bits of awesome. I _loved_ it. Having a goal was good; it was the first time I’d thought about anything farther off than the next few hours since June. All summer, it had seemed to fill up my day just to get dressed and eat and maybe do a little light reading. Having something definite to do four or five times a week seemed to expand my days around it, and I could start fitting other pieces of my life back in.

I have a theory that it helped with the magic, too, but there’s no way of proving that. The magic was still painfully slow to return, and I hurt myself accidentally more times than I could count, but it did come back.

I worked on my rings for a while. Doing the etchings around each band was great informal PT for my hand, and the whole process required only a tiny, persistent trickle of will. And I took the chance to refine the runic spells some, too.

John found me sketching out ideas at the kitchen island one evening. He leaned over my shoulder, unapologetically nosy, and I explained how it worked in layman’s terms. Magic is good that way – it works through metaphor speak, so it’s way easier to explain than do.

“They’ve never been as efficient as I wanted, though,” I concluded. “They were almost never completely topped up when I triggered them. Maybe I just need to punch more people, I don’t know.”

“Make extras,” John said immediately. “Swap them out.”

“I just said I could never top off one set,” I protested.

“I could wear them, couldn’t I?” he said. “The energy would still accumulate from my movements even though I’m not a wizard?”

“Oh!” I said. “You know, I never thought of that. It would work, yeah.” Stars, but he problem-solved like some people breathed. It was kind of annoying, actually.

“Make several sets,” John ordered, peremptory. “Do you need more silver?”

And so it was that a bunch of Chicago outfit goons started wearing silver rings with a lot of runic arcana etched into them. John had some elaborate system cooked up to keep track of which rings went to whom for how long to make sure I always had a fresh supply, but it essentially boiled down to a little candy dish of rings on his desk that he handed out to his particular favorites. They rapidly became a badge of honor, or so I understood from Gard.

I thought the whole thing was fucking hilarious, personally.

Molly didn’t. She came over sometimes to work with me on the little magical projects I set myself, and to do her own work with supervision.

“Oh come on,” I said at her frowning response to my story. “Not even a little funny? Nothing?”

“You’re not leaving him, then,” Molly said.

“Huh?”

She was working through a complicated resonance problem that involved laying out a huge, intricate pattern of metal and wood shavings, and moving them around until the right flow shaped. There wasn’t room downstairs, so we had taken over the dining room table.

Molly touched a piece of cherry wood, rotating it gently. “I thought you would stop doing . . . whatever it is you’re doing with Marcone,” she said. “Now that you’re free from Winter.”

“Huh?” I said again, not getting it. “Why?”

“Oh, wow, I don’t know,” Molly said with sudden fury. “Maybe because he pulled down seven figures last year from heroin distribution? Maybe because he has people who cross him executed on, like, a bimonthly schedule? Maybe because there’s a good chance he’s going to do it to you eventually?”

“Okay,” I said, stampeded into defensiveness. “First off, I really don’t think it’s fair to – Molly? Grasshopper, what . . .?” She was crying, head bent, the tears leaking silently onto the table. “Whoa, hey,” I said brilliantly. Then I pulled it together and hustled around the table to hug her. She turned into my shoulder, tears hot through my t-shirt, still not making a sound. “Okay, okay,” I said, rubbing her back. “Grasshopper, hey. What’s this about?”

She looked up at me, damp and still furious. “We were supposed to get you back,” she said fiercely. “When you were free again. And instead _he_ is.”

“Hey, no, It’s not like that,” I protested. And then more carefully, “And . . . things change.” I winced, because it came out inane for something that was actually really important. Things broke. They burned up in a fire, they exploded, they were lost, they died. People sold themselves to the Winter Queen and became someone else. Sometimes more literally than others. And what you could salvage or rebuild or buy again on the other side was not the same.

“I know that,” Molly said. Of course she did – she was Michael’s daughter. She leaned away from me, sniffing wetly and dropping about fifteen years. This whole thing was really unlike her. Clearly I’d been neglecting my apprentice.

“Grasshopper,” I said seriously. “You’re not losing me. You could be a cannibal – you could like the _Twilight_ books, and you won’t lose me. You got that?”

She smiled, even though I sensed that wasn’t really what she’d wanted to hear. What did she want to hear?

I saw Hendricks over her shoulder, turning away from the door and going down the hall. How long had he been there?

“Okay,” Molly said. “That’s nice to know. Thanks, Harry.” She swiped the remaining tears away. “Sorry about, you know. The waterworks.”

“All part of the service,” I said.

Molly snorted. “Oh please. I saw your face, you totally choked there for a second, don’t lie.”

And we were back on solid footing, though her eyes were a little red and her lashes damp. Maybe we needed some wizard-apprentice bonding time, a weekend away on Demonreach, something like that. Molly had put up with a lot from me – my absences, my wandering attention, my entanglement in crisis after crisis. I should do better. Now that I could do better.

“Are you good here for a minute?” I asked, gesturing at the table. “Not going to bring the chandelier down?”

“I got it,” Molly said, making me feel a hundred times better with a single dismissive eye roll.

“Back in a sec,” I said, and ducked down the hall. Hendricks had probably been heading for the back stairs. I was right – he was shuffling papers at John’s desk.

“Early day?” I asked, sticking my head in.

He didn’t look up. “No.”

So he was fetching something, probably. Not that he could be bothered to tell me that, oh no. I smoked with Gard, and we talked shop. There weren’t all that many other people allowed into John’s life, but I was on nodding acquaintance with the guys who came and went regularly, and the nearly invisible house staff. Hendricks, though? Nada.

“You don’t like me much, do you, Cujo?” I said.

He took his time collecting what he wanted and stowing it in a briefcase. He didn’t talk until he had turned to look at me. “Marcone’s a smart guy,” he said. “Savvy. A survivor. But everybody does dumb things.”

And I, it was understood, was a really dumb thing. Hendricks walked out, brushing close by me when I didn’t move out of his way fast enough.

“All righty then, glad we had this talk,” I called after him. “Maybe next time we can try hugging it out.”

I went back downstairs to Molly and, after she left, out for a long run.

The marathon was a little later than usual that year. Serendipitously, it ended up on my birthday.

“And here I was, wondering what to get you,” John said as we got up before sunrise that morning. “If only I’d known that what you really wanted was a chance to make your body do things no sane person would want to.”

I felt good, fitter than I’d been in a while. My hand was still stiff, and it hurt like a bastard on cold mornings, and my elbow on that side still wouldn’t unbend completely, and I had some gnarly scars on my back. But I felt good.

The last half hour of waiting for the gun to go was the worst part. I was near the front, and I hopped from foot-to-foot a lot, cold and jittery. But once I started running, I felt much better. Everyone around me was wearing earbuds. I couldn’t run with one of those little Apple thingies, obviously, but I was used to that. Running had always been either my very serious thinking time or my not thinking at all time.

The first five miles flew by. I made myself slow down for the next five, which turned out to be a good move because suddenly around mile eleven, I was miserable. I ran off two separate cramps, and I was getting too tired too fast.

I tried to think about other things: Molly’s increasing proficiency with those materials-based sensitivity spells; Murphy’s on-again thing with Kincaid; the way Mouse still limped sometimes; those stupid insurance commercials with the lizard that had managed to embed themselves in my consciousness even though I rarely watched TV; the legs on the woman I was passing; what the hell I was going to get for John’s birthday this year. What do you get for a guy who has everything when you’ve already gotten him a sex kitten? It was a problem.

Things got a little easier around mile fourteen. I ate a Power Bar and guzzled some water, though I wasn’t actually sweating too much in the chill. My longest training run had been just twenty one miles, and I’d only been about eighty percent sure that it would all come together today. But I found myself thinking, _hey, yeah, this is going to happen_ as I passed mile fifteen.

And then I figured out what Molly had meant. My subconscious is slow, but it gets there eventually. It just tends to spit up its results at inconvenient moments.

She’d said, _you’re not leaving him now that you’re free_ , and what she’d meant was _you don’t have to lie down with dogs anymore, so you can stop . . . lying down with dogs_. Like being with John was the same thing as my year in faerie hell. Or like a symptom, maybe. Which wasn’t . . . well, it wasn’t entirely wrong.

It wasn’t exactly like I’d disappeared into a faerie nightmare, and woke up sleeping with John Marcone. Living off him, too, for months now. Living _with_ him, because it was the only place I’d wanted to go when we got out of faerie, and I’d never wanted to leave even after I could have. And he didn’t want me to leave, either.

So it wasn’t like some twisted faerie enchantment had made me do it, even if it kind of felt like it, because I could also remember how goddamn hard we both worked at this. John was a cold, proprietary, fucked up nutjob with a controlling streak a mile wide. I could hear him in my head dryly saying, _those are some of my good points, yes_. And I was a sarcastic, uncommunicative, stubborn wizard with a huge chip on my shoulder for authority. We set each other off like the Fourth of July just by breathing sometimes, and it wasn’t always the good kind of fireworks that make you feel alive.

We’d worked hard at it, both of us. And we’d played this game with each other, taking turns pushing the boundaries: I went to him when Amanda Beckitt died, and a week later he’d given me keys to five separate properties where he regularly stayed. It was like playing chicken with intimacy, both of us pushing and pushing and waiting to see who blinked first. And neither of us blinked.

So it wasn’t like I hadn’t known what we were doing. But Molly wasn’t exactly wrong, either – none of it ever would have happened if I’d been more sane, if my life had still belonged to me.

But it had happened. It was happening. And she was right about him, about his business, anyway. I had changed, yeah, there was no denying that, but I still hated what he did.

I’d started to defend him to Molly, though, automatically, and I discovered I had all these justifications lined up in my head about how he was the least of many evils, and about his private code of behavior, and how I was no Helen of Troy, but he’d been preparing to go to fucking _war_ with Winter for me.

Okay then, Dresden. Straight up: no justifications, no pretty stories. Run the numbers. Can you live with it?

Wrong question. I had been living with it. Could I stop?

Like _hell_ I would stop. Harry Dresden would not be the one to blink first, thank you very much.

The really good high didn’t hit me until late, at mile twenty one. But then I was golden all the way home. The last mile was fucking amazing, and I slapped hands down the final sprint to the finish.

The little plastic gizmo they’d put on my shoe to record my time had mysteriously malfunctioned. Who’d have guessed? I slammed back a water bottle and started peeling a banana, and then John was there with Mouse on a leash, because he was hilariously obedient to city ordinances like that.

“Congratulations,” he said. Mouse licked the sweat off the backs of my knees, friendly and disgusting. “How do you feel?”

“Awesome,” I said. “Could do another one right now.”

“How about lunch instead?” he offered, dropping his coat over my shoulders. “Steak?”

My whole body sat up and went _woof_. “Oh no,” I said. “I want the entire fucking cow.”

It was a great birthday. I wandered around in a haze for hours, tripping off the endorphins and smiling like a loon. I ended up on the living room floor early that evening, stretched out flat with a bellyful of steak and potatoes and salad, while John dug the heels of his hands into my quads.

“Did it help?” he asked into a comfortable silence. He wasn’t talking about the massage.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking it through. It was hard to explain: I felt more settled now, as if I had somehow fit myself back into my body again. I rolled onto my back, stretching. “So,” I said. “Do you still want me to work for you?”

I had the pleasure of seeing John’s startled face for a full five seconds. “Yes,” he said. “Is this an offer?”

“No,” I said. “And it’s never going to be. Can you deal with that?”

“Yes,” he said instantly.

I made a skeptical face. “You think no is something that applies to other people.”

He crawled up me until his hands were on either side of my head. “But you say yes to me all the time,” he said, and kissed me.

I slept for twelve solid hours that night, and the first thing I did when I got up was call Luccio.

“Uh, hey,” I said, because there’s always this awful sinking moment when we talk where I have no idea what to say to her for a second.

“Happy birthday,” Luccio said. Never let it be said that Ana isn’t a class act.

“Thanks.” I twiddled the phone cord. “And for the sword, since I don’t think I said it enough the first time.”

“It was the least I could do.”

Actually, the least she could have done was tell me to fuck off, but I wasn’t going to argue. “Yeah, about that,” I said. “I think I’m good to go, you can stop shunting my warden work off to poor Ramirez and whatshisname in Quebec.”

“His name was Granuille,” she said. “And he’s been dead for three months.”

Ouch. “Sorry,” I said, wincing. “Catch me up?”

*

  


  
**December 21**   


It was a long trip through the nevernever, just me and a small duffle and my mother’s voice in my head. She was kind of like those newfangled GPS things, only a lot more bittersweet. I didn’t even bring Mouse. I was going to, automatically, and then it didn’t seem quite right.

So I was alone when I came out of the nevernever at the base of a small cliff. It was a balmy Hawaiian afternoon, and the snow crusted on my boots melted fast as I got my bearings. Okay, if I’d done this right, this was the beach with the seventeen vowels in its name that I couldn’t pronounce, and I just had a quick mile hike north.

It had been fifteen degrees when I left Chicago that morning. I stripped off my coat as I went, and thought seriously about losing my sweater, too. There wasn’t a single other person in sight. Weird – you’d think this kind of gorgeous would come with busloads of tourists guaranteed. Then again, privacy had probably been part of what John meant when he’d said, “I’ll take care of it.”

He’d probably meant other things, too. He generally did; I didn’t always figure them out until much later. And he’d maneuvered the whole thing so offhandedly, it’d taken me days to realize he’d just been waiting for his moment.

He’d caught me coming in after midnight last Wednesday. Winter surprises me every goddamn year – one second it’s September and I’m running the trails in Grant Park in shorts, and then _bam_ it’s December, there’s a wind whistling down at forty miles an hour from the fucking arctic, and I haven’t dug out my winter coat yet. Or bought a new one to replace the one I’d lost in the fire, as the case may be. Which I might have bitched about at length to John when he found me trying to stack logs in the fireplace with numb hands.

“We should go somewhere warm,” he’d said, nudging me out of the way to do it himself. I really don’t know how he runs an operation as big as he does, seeing as he’s completely incapable of delegating.

“Eh?” I’d said, not really getting what he’d meant.

He’d rolled his eyes. “When’s the last time you went on vacation?” he’d asked. “And travel that included any form of smiting, slaying, or wanton property destruction doesn’t count.”

“Aww, baby, you know I only destroy _your_ property,” I’d said.

“I know,” he’d said. He didn’t have the fire lit yet, but I warmed up under that look. It was almost disarming, how pleased he was. Then again, it also pissed me off. That’s how it worked – he got proprietary, I got uppity about it. I didn’t actually want to be fucking anyone else, that wasn’t the point. It was just the natural order of things.

“When was _your_ last vacation?” I’d asked.

“I spent two weeks on the Mediterranean March before last,” he’d said. “I try to take some time away every year. Vacations are important for maintaining peak efficiency. But I’ve been busy lately.”

I was sleeping with a guy who scheduled his vacations to maximize his productivity. Stars and stones.

“There,” he’d said, sitting back from the fireplace. “Have at it.”

His tone was casual, but his eyes on me really, really weren’t. I smirked, rubbed my hands together theatrically, and went for broke. It was theoretically as easy to evoke the fireball in my hands as opposed to the wood, as if I’d struck it off my palms. I flicked it from hand-to-hand once, getting flashy, then tossed it lightly into the kindling, where it _whumped_ up.

“Really now,” John said softly. “That’s just asking for it.”

“Good luck with that,” I’d said. “My balls are _ice cubes_.”

“Let me help you with that,” he’d said, knee-walking closer. “Take your clothes off.”

So I’d told him what he could do with that peremptory tone, and he’d told me if I wanted him to say please this time I was going to have to make him, and things rolled along quite nicely from there.

I was stretched out on the hearth rug much later, warm down to my toes, when he said, “So it’s settled. We’ll leave next week. I’ll take care of everything.”

He was a peremptory asshole who _never, ever learned_.

So here I was, hiking along a deserted beach somewhere on the north shore of Kauai, feeling a little weird. Like maybe I was about to walk into something I wasn’t entirely prepared for, even though we’d been mostly living together for six months now. So like every Monday, then, only with an added ocean view.

The house was set back about a hundred yards from the shore in a sandy clearing. I knew it was the right place because I hadn’t actually seen any other options, and also John was waiting for me on the wooden steps out front. He was devastatingly casual in jeans and a faded black t-shirt, with the sun highlighting the gray at his temples and the lines around his eyes. I wanted to hook my fingers in his waistband for leverage and just rub myself all over him.

“Hey,” he said, coming down to stand on the bottom step so he was just a bit taller than me.

“Did you have a nice trip in the flying metal tube of death?” I asked. I realize planes work fine in theory when there isn’t a wizard on them, but they just freak me out. Flying without magic seems so unreliable.

“It was fine,” he said, and eyed me up and down, lingering on the state of my jeans. “Did you have a good . . . swamp crawl?”

“There are no first-class tickets through faerie,” I said. His lips tightened. “Relax, jeez, I went the long way around, only across Summer lands and neutral territory, I told you. And speaking of paranoid and obnoxiously over protective, where’s Cujo?”

“Back home,” he said, smiling faintly. “Perhaps he and Mouse can keep each other company.”

We’d both left our guard dogs at home. Okay. He kissed me, tilting my head back with a thumb under my jaw and enjoying the hell out of his temporary height advantage. “Come in,” he said, and pulled me up the steps.

The house was beautiful. All the furniture was made of a light, reddish wood I couldn’t identify; it looked very warm against the blue and green tile floors. The bed was huge, and there was a whirlpool tub out on the second story deck. “If you haven’t hexed that in the next week, I’m clearly doing something wrong,” John said.

We didn’t leave the house for two days. It never seemed to drop below sixty, so we kept the deck doors open most of the time, the curtains floating on the breeze. I’d never spent much time by the ocean before; The sound was unexpectedly soothing. It slowed us down, I think, quieted us. We fucked long and hot and slow as the tide came in when we woke up the first morning; I didn’t realize for a long while that we had picked up the rhythm of the waves without meaning to.

It turned out John was pretty good at vacationing. He had a whole list of possible daytrips and entertainments, but we weren’t on a schedule or anything. We hiked some, and ate a lot of really extravagant meals. I wanted to swim, but the ocean by the house was apparently too dangerous, so we went to Ke’e where I could go out so far even my feet couldn’t touch the sand anymore. John stayed close, floating quietly as I stared out to the horizon.

“You know,” he said at last, “you have the same look on your face when you see something beautiful and when you’re doing magic.”

“It’s kind of the same thing, here,” I said. “The ocean is . . .” I trailed off inarticulately.

He frowned. “I thought it would ground magic?” he said. “Or do the tides not count as running water?”

‘No, they do,” I said. “That’s why I took off all the hardware.” I gestured with my bare hands and wrist, touched the naked place where my pentacle should be. “And saltwater neutralizes all sorts of things. This is like a purifying bath for me.” I stared north. “But it has its own power. I mean, just _look_ at that.”

I felt him float closer, and he touched the back of my neck. “You can feel it?”

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing. “It’s—“ chilly, alien, awful and awesome “—big.” So big, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to parse it as a sensation ten years ago. But there’s a steady power accretion through a wizard’s middle age, and I was climbing the curve harder and faster than most.

John is as plain vanilla as they come, but he can still be fucking eerie sometimes. “Gard thinks you will be one of the most powerful wizards in the world,” he said, like he was following my thoughts. “Is that true?”

I’d never quite put it to myself like that. “If I live that long?” I said, lifting one hand and flicking water droplets into the air. “. . . Yeah, things are going that way.”

“All right,” John said, calmly running his thumb up and down the back of my neck. I wondered if he had really wanted an answer, or if he’d just wanted to let me know that he knew. “You need more sunscreen,” he said. “Let’s go back in.”

We stayed close to base the next day. John, the self-proclaimed mongrel, was tanning his way towards a mellow olive tone at a nearly visible rate. I just turned pink and peeled, so I stuck to the shady side of the deck.

When I looked up from my book early in the afternoon, he was asleep. I stared for a while – he almost always got up before me, so I didn’t get to see this very often. He was on his stomach, legs stretched to the length of a lounger, one arm crooked over his head. His face was mostly hidden behind his bicep, but I could see the utter relaxation in the softness at the corner of his mouth.

Being with John was . . . intense. He wasn’t ever just a guy having a life. When he was with me, he was _with me_ , a hundred and fifty percent. That sort of attention could be really flattering. Also really exhausting. Sometimes it was like being with me was an obstacle course he had to run with a drill sergeant screaming at him the whole time. I tried not to take it personally – he was like that about everything important to him. So Chicago, and me.

I got up as quietly as I could and went into the house. The kitchen was fully stocked, and it didn’t take me long to find the carton of salt meant to refill the shaker. I brought it back out onto the deck, surprised when he was still asleep. I walked a circle around him, trailing salt, mouthing an off-the-cuff incantation. When I knelt down and willed my power into the circle, it rose with a nearly perceptible hum. The sun seemed to dim, and the ocean sounded like it was at the bottom of a really deep well.

When I turned around, John was wide awake and watching me. He hadn’t moved, but he might as well have been a dog on point.

“It’s just a circle,” I said. “I wanted to be absolutely sure no one could hear us.”

“The house was swept for bugs,” he said. “And Gard came out here for a day, too.”

“Yeah, I figured.” I took two steps and sat on the side of the lounger. He was sun warm, like a lizard on a rock.

“What are you doing?” he asked. I realized I was spinning my shield bracelet around my wrist so it clattered musically.

“Something impulsive,” I said. “I have a daughter.” He didn’t move; there was just a different quality to his stillness against my hip. “Her name’s Maggie. Margaret. For my mother. She’s nine now. Her birthday was a few weeks ago.”

I couldn’t figure out his expression when I finally looked at him. “Do I get to meet her?”

I laughed, bitter. “Probably not. _I_ barely got to meet her. She’s somewhere safe.”

That look I recognized: it was disappointment. I suddenly knew, sight unseen, that he didn’t just care about kids the way people do, abstractly. He also liked them. I bet he was great with them. And he’d really wanted to know _my_ kid.

“I’ve passed a few letters,” I said. “Presents, that sort of thing. But I haven’t seen her since she was seven.”

“I see,” he said, and I thought maybe he kind of did. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, sending her away. Not that there had been any time, really. But these days, I didn’t feel like I was making a noble sacrifice for her benefit, to keep her safe. It just felt like I’d made a bunch of bad decisions that turned me into the guy who failed her because his life was too complicated for a kid.

“Anyway,” I said, and stood up quickly. “Things might change. I’d bet your entire stock portfolio that she’s going to be a wizard, and that’ll show up in the next few years. I don’t know what will happen then. She could go to Eb, maybe.”

John looked steadily at me. “But you want to be the one to teach her,” he said.

“Yes.” There were ways to make that less dangerous. They would take a lot of money, plenty of resources that I didn’t have. John did, though.

He nodded, eyes serious. “Let me know,” he said.

I nodded back, and broke the circle. The sea air rushed in on us all at once. It was the longest night of the year. Somewhere out there, my Godmother the Queen was preparing to party like it was 1999.

I would get to spend the night here, with John, making dinner and bickering about everything, and maybe accidentally hexing that hot tub. Yeah, I’d take that.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] A New Covenant](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9824132) by [Hananobira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hananobira/pseuds/Hananobira)




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